What have they come as? Halloween costume inspiration from the kids of 1887

Actually, don’t – their costumes were made by professional costumiers, befitting the hundreds of posh kids who sashayed into the lord mayoress’s fancy-dress ball for children at Adelaide town hall nearly 140 years ago. But their rare and incredibly detailed photos could provide some Halloween inspiration.

My happy place is a hushed archive reading room looking at objects. I was looking for copyright-free researching images for my latest book, Spooky Ladies, and silently squeed as these costume photos were delivered in a very long, narrow, custom-made heritage-green box by the good folk at the State Library of South Australia, packed tightly with more than 300 stiff “cabinet cards”, showing kids dressed as fairies, devils, astrologers, witches, and fortune tellers.

On that rainy spring night in 1887, just under 400 kids, of the 700 or so invited, tromped into the town hall hung about with favourite colonial decorations: ferns, British flags, and lots of mirrors reflecting the flowers and chandeliers. There were cloakrooms, a dancefloor and supper room. Hundreds of parents paid for tickets to watch from the upper reaches of the halls.

Two standouts were wee Isabel Stuckey, 7, as a “white witch”, and tween-aged Ethel Hamilton, 12, dressed as one of Satan’s helpers.

Isabel and Ethel were just two of the girls there from the most privileged white families of colonial South Australia; sons and daughters of publicans, politicians, public servants, and pastoralists. An annual event for a while there in the Victorian era, the 1887 ball was hosted by the mayor’s second wife, Elizabeth (eventually Lady) Smith. She’s the only adult whose photo is saved in the collection; frocked up as Elizabeth I.

Other ball attenders were wearing cozzies showing their era’s own nostalgia, or their own times and class. Lots of milkmaids, English and French royals, cricketers, sailors, Kate Greenaway illustrations, popular songs, jesters and fishwives.

Most kids adopted the solemn, standard photo-face of the late 19th century, but some look almost gleeful. Geraldine Hargrave sported a wry smile posing as a masherette – the girl version of a masher, a kiss-chasing, dandy archetype chap of the day that girls tried to avoid. Other girls dressed as their aspiration: female scholars in gowns and mortarboards, a novelty in the days when very few women were allowed into universities.

One astronomically clever boy, Leslie Gardner, 10, fronted up as an eclipse with one side of his face black, the other white.

A book by Adern Holt published that year carried instructions for a hornet costume and others including a wastepaper basket, a female demon, and the Suez canal. (For a vampire, wear bat-wing sleeves and “put bat in hair”.)

Ten-year-old Edith Brock was snapped sporting an insouciant and mermaidy gaze. She was emblematic of the costumed girls, growing up part of the debutante-set, set to be a “spinster” or marry into another of various local grandee families of Bonythons, Downers and Ayerses.

Witness Edith’s “wealth of golden hair” as described in the newspapers. At one time engaged to an English soldier, she stayed a rich miss to the end of her days in 1927. Many little girls from these photos from 1887 didn’t marry until they were older, or at all, reflecting probably the death toll of the first world war, and a financial independence due to family wealth.

Another typical attender was Fred Tennant, a 13-year-old dressed as Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi. He grew up to be a lawyer and horse-breeder. His grandfather John Tennant came from England a lowly Scottish shepherd, and with his eldest son Andrew became rich on land “cleared” of Aboriginal people by threats and killings, and married off his kids to “respectable” society figures. Fred was disowned for marrying a non-connected woman, Kathleen.

By the early 1900s, (always Miss) Birdie Dean was a regular in the social pages: she holidayed in London, frocked up in cream satin or black marocain at afternoon teas, stayed with friends in the wine district, and baked a cake to help raise money for soldiers.

May the spirit of the 1887 seamstresses be with you this weekend while you’re stapling together some last-minute Halloween get-ups. If you can’t manage a taxidermied bat in your up-do, take heart. It’s probably the only night of the year when a dad can lead the kids through the neighbourhood wearing a tea-towel as a cape, and his Speedos over his trousers, demanding lollies with menace.

• Spooky Ladies: Rebels, witches, mediums & magic by Kaz Cooke is published by Simon & Schuster ($37.99)